Ash Wednesday

by Chet Williamson

  "Who's Otto Floyd?"

  "Our garbage man. But he also drives the Hatch Road school bus. And they don't have a replacement for him.”

  “Me? I never drove a bus before."

  "Oh, it'd be easy. It's just like a car, only bigger. Isn't it?"

  He lay quietly in the darkness, thinking.

  "It's a couple of hours in the morning and some in the afternoon. And you get a lot of extra time for trips and things. Five dollars an hour is what Otto's getting."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "I make all the bus arrangements."

  "You do the hiring?"

  "The board. You can't buy a pencil without the board. But I'm your in, right?"

  "Only a hundred a week," he mused.

  "Plus eighty for the columns plus whatever extra there might be for field trips and sports and such. It's almost as good as a full-time job."

  "I'm not a bus driver, though."

  "Otto can teach you. He likes me."

  "Oh, yeah? Why?"

  "He says I'm pretty."

  "You're—“

  "And he likes my garbage bags. Says they never split open."

  He laughed, then stopped suddenly.

  "What's wrong?" Beth asked.

  "It's crazy." he said. "Here I am, a thirty-five-year-old college graduate, and a garbage man is going to teach me a trade."

  "Well," Beth said after a moment, "recessions make strange bedfellows."

  They retreated then to their individual thoughts, and Jim wondered if he would be able to drive a bus, wondered if the board would think his hiring smacked of nepotism, wondered if it would all come easy.

  And it did. It was so simple that he could hardly fathom it. It seemed that he, who had never driven anything larger than a Mustang, had been born to drive a bus. After Otto had shown him the basics, the big orange-yellow box became an extension of his body, going nimbly where he wanted it to, turning, twisting, stopping precisely as his hands and feet guided it. "Jesus, but you got the touch there, Mr. Callendar," Otto told him. Jim had asked him to call him by his first name, but Otto ignored the pleasantry, as if sensing a caste separation that the necessity of sharing the same duty was not enough to bridge. "Jesus Christ, you got it sure."

  Jim backed the bus into the allotted space where it seemed to nest, engine purring lovingly. "I'll tell you, Otto, it handles better than a car. Hell, I can barely parallel park in my Dodge.”

  "Don't matter." Otto grinned through a mouthful of worn and broken teeth like a battered picket fence come to life. He pushed his Schmidt's beer cap back up on his forehead, revealing a vast expanse of mottled leathery skin. "Ain't the same thing. Now, you get your truck drivers and they think right off they can handle buses. Why shit, man, 'tain't the same thing at all. Bus is in one piece and a truck's in two. Ain't got no hitch on a bus, see what I mean. And that's why your car drivers is often a helluva lot better at buses than your truckers. 'Cause of the pieces. Leastways that's what I think." He wiped his nose with a dirty sleeve. "Let's take her out again."

  Later, Jim thought of the bus the same way he thought of a Harlem whore. Everything is so easy until you step into that dark hallway, and bang. You know suddenly that all those smiles and come-ons and having everything so easy was only to lure you in, to draw you to that dark place where the force comes out of the black corners and cuts you down, tears out your heart, steals everything worth having. The scene was carved into his memory, slammed with chisels and mallets into the tough granite of his mind never to fade or to be eroded by years.

  It was three days away from the shortest day of the year. It was cold and grim and gray, and the clouds spat snow instead of letting it drift down. It was a cruel day, and the wind bore knives that cut through the thickness of even his down jacket. The darkness had started to close in before four o'clock, and as he guided the massive hulk of the bus down the road on the last leg of its journey, he turned the lights on full bright. The children were in the back, only five of them not yet home: Tracy Gianelli, a third grader with eyes so black and large that Jim fancied her a changeling; Bobby Miller, a sixth grader, tall, thin, aviator glasses perched on his aquiline nose like a wide-eyed bird about to take off; Jennifer Raber, short, fat, freckled, the butt of second-grade jokes because of her stuttering, jokes that Jim would not permit on his bus; Frank Meyers, loud, a troublemaker, forgivable only because he came from a broken home, an excuse that became more tiresome and less acceptable as the weeks passed.

  And Terry. Terence John Callendar. Flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood. Only son and heir of the Driver, the Man Behind the Wheel, the Guardian of these five lives, sworn to protect and defend them from the tempest raging outside, pledged to give up his own life in the service of God and country and five little kids in the back of the bus, one reading a Hardy Boys book, two singing a Dolly Parton song, two talking quietly, looking out the streaked windows, watching the snow descend solidly onto the two-lane where Ginder Road met Kaylor Hollow Road.

  They began themselves to descend the hill, for perhaps the seventieth time that school year and for the seven thousandth in Jim Callendar's determined memory. Nothing changed. No giant magical hand (Tracy Gianelli's sorcerous friends?) scooped the bus up out of harm's way. Harm fell again, in the shape of the rusting farm truck that slipped down Kaylor Hollow Road, skidded through the stop sign, and slammed into the right rear of the school bus, swinging its huge mass over the snow-covered slope as lightly as a skater, so that the rear of the bus splintered the spindly guardrail.

  The bus did not poise and hover over the edge, as in a movie or a dream. There was no millisecond of breath for God or Superman to yank it back onto the road. It simply went over, rear end first, rolling down the forty-degree bank like a mammoth Tootsietoy. Jim was aware of many things at once—his own disbelief, a sharp jolt to his shoulder, sudden cold, a rain of sparkling crystals, and cries.

  The cries were wordless, mere animal noises of fright and panic. And as the bus rolled over and over again they seemed to ebb and flow, as though he were putting his hands over his ears in rhythm with the turning of the bus. Then just before it suddenly stopped rolling, he felt himself being lifted and turned once more, thrown against cracking hinges on the other side of the cab, and he was lying in the snow, his right arm and leg tangled in a thorn bush that gave him up with a hiss of ripping nylon as he tore away from it, thinking for a moment he had been trapped by some beast.

  But reality returned, and he remembered what had happened. The bus lay on its right side like a slaughtered behemoth, its engine still grinding away with a howl of twisted metal. Something covered by brush lit up the darkness with brightly crackling sparks, and he thought of the fire extinguisher, but realized he could not get to it. The door through which he had been hurled was now against the ground, but he did not pause to think about how closely he had come to being crushed. One thought only beat at him: Terry Terry Terry . . .

  The children were still calling now, the end of motion allowing true words to form for at least one of them, who cried "Mama, Mama" in a voice so pinched with terror that Jim could not tell the sex of the speaker. "Terry!" he shouted, but there was no answer.

  The sparks glowed brighter as he limped back to the rear of the toppled bus. The interior lights were off, but he could detect glimpses of movement through both the broken and intact glass of the windows. "Terry!"

  "Mama, Mama!" The litany droned on hysterically, mingled with the other softer sounds of pain, of not understanding what had happened or why. Jim kept moving, around to the back door, where he tugged at the handle. But the door had warped, buckled under the ruinous descent that had sprung the front door, and would not be moved. He battered on the bent metal. "Hey!" he yelled. "Push the door! Push it open! "

  A face swam into view then, illuminated only by the reflection of the whitening sparks, like some luminous fish in a midnight aquarium. It was a thin face, made skeletal by the absence of eyes. Bobby Miller's aviator glass
es had imploded into him, and Jim could see shards of glass sparkling in the gouged out hollows. The boy's mouth was a black hole smeared with red, and his thin fingers scratched at the glass of the back window like a mole digging into darkness.

  Jim gasped and stumbled back, tripping and falling in the curiously wet snow. But the thought of his son drove him up again, and he scrambled apelike on hands and feet around the side of the bus to where the gaunt machinery of its underside was revealed in the white glow of the sparks. And now he could see that the sparks had set something on fire so that blue and yellow flame tinted the pure white light that the still-groaning and ratcheting engine had caused. He paused, wondering for a second, then stepped onto the inside of the right rear tire, grasped the high edge of the left tire, and so pulled himself up onto the side of the bus, thinking, A window, I can pull them out through a window.

  From on top of the side, the interior of the bus seemed filled with ink, though he could see small bits of movement. "Terry!" he cried again, scuttling on his knees to a window that had been shattered by the fall. "Look out!" he called, and began to pound with his bare fist at the sectioned shards that remained, which flew apart into small sharp-edged pellets like clearer, more solid snowflakes.

  "Mama! Mama!" came the cry from within, louder now without the glass to filter it.

  Oh, Terry, Jim thought, be alive, be all right, not like the other boy, and then he called his son's name again, willing at that moment to give an arm, an eye, his life, just to hear the boy call back, even to hear him scream. He lay on his stomach and thrust an arm down through the shattered window, reaching about, feeling for flesh, a coat sleeve, the smooth rubber of galoshes. "Come here! Come to the window! Give me your hand!" There was something then that brushed his hand and slipped quickly away. He grasped frantically and small fingers touched his own. He tightened his grip then, desperately, and felt the bones of the hand he held snap like twigs beneath his maniacal hold. The fingers did not move otherwise. There was no attempt to pull back, away. But when he tried to lift up, the little hand slipped into the blackness as though it had been greased, and when he looked unbelievingly at his own empty hand, he saw that it was smeared with red.

  "Nooo!" he howled, and swung his body around, putting his feet through the window and placing his weight on his arms to drop down inside the bus.

  A new sound stopped him, a dull roaring whoosh that silenced the voice that cried for its mother, quieted the other wordless voice in the black void beneath Jim's feet, even stilled his own ragged breathing. A second later the glow from the underside of the bus grew much brighter, and Jim suddenly realized how strong the smell of gas was, and why the cold dry snow had seemed so wet.

  He twisted, dragged his feet out of the hole, and slithered over to the edge. The snow beneath was blue with flame, and the now-vertical underside of the bus was a growing wall of fire at the top of which he stood. He did not feel the fire's heat or the storm's cold. There was no feeling at all except for the overwhelming sense of standing on the edge of a great abyss with death below and something worse behind. He seemed to balance there for an eternity, all thinking relinquished to the primitive urges of the viscera as he hovered between the fire and the darkness behind him while the snow fell and the monster roared beneath.

  Jim turned, ran, and leaped into the night. But he did not fall.

  ~*~

  He leaped forever, away from fire, away from shattered glass, away from the blackened, silent metal womb. He did not feel himself touch the ground, did not feel himself land in snow or brush or high grass. When he looked again, he saw a pyre rising, brightening the night sky, the falling snow making the scene appear dreamlike, subaqueous. He was standing watching it, wondering how he had jumped, what had pushed him. Had there been a blast? An explosion that had thrust him from his perch? But he had heard no explosion, and he was not singed, burned. No, there was just the fire. The bus on fire, outside and in. He could see the flames through the glass now.

  And he realized that his son was dead, and that there was nothing he could do about it.

  Something pulled him down onto the snow, and he sat and watched dry-eyed as the bus continued to burn, sat and watched with the sure and certain knowledge that he had done something wrong, something bad, and that his world would never be the same because of what he had done.

  It was a child's thought, and they treated him like a child when they finally came, far too late, with their sirens and their flashing lights and their long hoses that made the heated metal hiss. They carried him to the ambulance because, although he could walk, he would not, and when they went to put him in the back, he broke away, half running, half falling down the slope, calling Terry's name as he went. The firemen stopped him before he could reach the smoking bus, and one of the ambulance attendants stabbed him with a needle. After that, he let them take him, and he fell asleep on the way to the hospital.

  When he awoke, Beth was with him, her eyes red from tears, and he thought that it was years earlier, and he had been operated on again, and she was crying because it was malignant and she was afraid he was going to die. He was about to tell her that it was all right and not to worry, when he remembered the fire, and remembered jumping, but not landing, and he thought it strange that he could not remember landing.

  Then he remembered Terry.

  Beth gasped as he sat bolt upright, the room swimming dizzily before him so that he fell back at once. "Terry . . ." he croaked, and her face twisted with an anguish too great for him to look at, so that he closed his eyes against it. When he opened them, her face had not changed, and her body was shaking with heavy, silent sobbing.

  Jim went home the next day. The house was echoingly empty. Terry's toys, books, clothes, all stood as mute reminders and accusations. All the children were dead, all burned in the fire that had resulted from the splitting of the gas tank. Dead too was Henry Martin, whose truck had struck the bus. Of all those involved in the accident only Jim survived.

  "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

  The quotation echoed and reechoed in his mind, and he was unable to banish it. Beth cushioned him from most of the harsh realities in the days that immediately followed. She identified the body and was pasty-faced for hours afterward; she made the funeral arrangements; she dealt with the insurance company that had held the $10,000 policy on Terry's life. Jim himself was physically untouched. His shoulder ached from when he'd been thrown out of the bus, but the pain vanished within days. He was sorry to lose it. It had been a symbol to him, a sign that he had somehow shared in what had taken his son. He had not yet been able to cry.

  Terry was cremated, the ashes interred, and a small memorial service was held for the five children. The bereaved parents were asked to sit together in the first few pews of the Merridale United Methodist Church. Though most of them smiled wanly, forgivingly, when they saw Jim, there was one man about Jim's age who fixed him with a dull malevolence. It was not as obvious as a snarl or a sneer, but something in the eyes that seemed to glitter with silent promise. The man looked menacing to begin with, Jim thought, with his close-set eyes and rapier-straight nose nearly hidden by the dense growth of beard and hair that, even now at the service, seemed unkempt and uncombed. He wore a tired blue blazer with unfashionably wide lapels and worn elbows. Jim noticed that one of the hollow fake brass buttons was pushed in so that it resembled a dented coin. The woman he was with (his wife?) seemed to draw neither strength nor comfort from the bearded man at her side, as though they were strangers, or had been familiar once a long time ago.

  When they were seated, Jim glanced to the side briefly to find that the man was watching him, head and shoulders slightly forward, out of rank. Jim sat back and did not look again, but he felt the man's gaze on him throughout the service, and it unnerved him so that he heard little of Pastor Craven's words.

  After the service Jim remained seated, his eyes closed as if in silent prayer. Only he knew the hypocrisy of his position; he was not
praying—he was waiting. Waiting for the bearded man with the accusing eyes to leave. At last he felt Beth's hand on his arm, heard her whisper his name over the high drone of the organ, and opened his eyes to find them alone in the pew. He sighed in relief, and together they walked down the aisle.

  Bill Gingrich and some other friends were in the narthex waiting for them, feeding them empty words of comfort. The other families were there as well: the Rabers with their two surviving children; Vince and Angie Gianelli, grim-lipped, next to Father Murphy; Rodney Miller, a widower who ran Miller's Feed Mill, standing with his brother Sim and his wife, all of them talking to Pastor Craven. Jim drew Gingrich aside and asked softly, "The one with the beard. Who was he?"

  Bill Gingrich frowned. "Frank Meyers's father. Brad. The woman's the mother, but they got divorced a few years back. The boy lived with her. Why?"

  "He . . . I don't know. Just curious."

  Gingrich shook his head. "Don't pay any attention to him. He may give you the evil eye, but he's relatively harmless."

  Jim nodded, and they rejoined the small group of mourners. But when they left the church Jim saw Brad Meyers sitting alone behind the wheel of a battered green Volkswagen parked next to their Dodge. The Volks was on Beth's side of the car, and Jim went with her, opening the door and holding it as she got in, oblivious to Brad Meyers's snakelike stare. Jim closed the door behind her, his heart pounding as he knew what he would do next. He turned to the man. "I'm sorry," he said through the open window. "I'm sorry about your boy."

  Meyers made no response. He only stared at Jim until he turned and got in the car next to Beth. When he backed out, Jim could swear he saw a small smile form amid the layers of beard.

  "That was Bradley Meyers, wasn't it?" Beth asked when they were out in the street. Jim nodded. "I thought so," she said.

  "You know him?"

  "By reputation. It's no wonder Frankie Meyers was as mean as he was. You remember that time in the Anchor parking lot? It must have been at least a year ago."